Xilinx Press Release # 0635

XILINX LAUNCHES ESL INITIATIVE TO ACCELERATE ADOPTION
OF SYSTEM LEVEL DESIGN FOR FPGAS  

FPGA leader drives collaboration across ESL ecosystem
to proliferate high-level design methodologies and tools

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 13, 2006 - Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX ) today launched the ESL Initiative ─ a multi-faceted program aimed at making electronic system level (ESL) design methodologies and tools more accessible to programmable system designers. The initiative expands collaboration across the ESL supply chain to better integrate and optimize ESL tool flows for both hardware designers and software programmers targeting Xilinx FPGAs. Initial participants include: Bluespec Inc.; Celoxica; CriticalBlue; Impulse Accelerated Technologies, Inc.; Mitrionics, Inc.; Nallatech; Poseidon Design Systems, Inc.; SystemCrafter; and Teja Technologies.

The ESL Initiative underscores the commitment by Xilinx and ESL tool providers to drive technological innovation and development of practical solutions that deliver on the full potential of this high-level design methodology. The initiative has identified four key areas of focus:

1. Improve ease of use to further simplify and abstract the details associated with FPGA design
   
2. Optimize support for Xilinx embedded PowerPC™ and MicroBlaze™ processor solutions
   
3. Improve the quality of results with high level language (HLL) synthesis tools
   
4. Establish common standards for FPGA ESL tool interoperability

Technical collaboration will be backed by cooperative marketing and educational programs to evangelize and promote the capabilities, strengths and benefits of FPGA ESL solutions. As part of that effort, Xilinx today launched the FPGA industry’s first ESL knowledge center at www.xilinx.com/esl and user blog at http://forums.xilinx.com/. The site organizes information on tools, design flows and applications, including details on how designers can get started with an ESL product evaluation.
The goal is to empower the user community to make informed decisions about ESL methodologies and solutions based on their specific requirements.

“Ensuring that all designers can readily access the benefits of programmability is fundamental to our vision for the industry, and ESL is an important convergence point for addressing the methodology and tool requirements of both hardware designers and software developers,” said Wim Roelandts, president and CEO of Xilinx. “We are impressed with the success that our ESL partners have had to date, and are committed to furthering their efforts in a way that expands the reach of ESL solutions and FPGAs to new applications and to users who have never before implemented designs in programmable logic.”

ESL for FPGA
ESL is an emerging design methodology that allows designers to work at higher levels of abstraction than typically supported by register transfer level (RTL) and gate level hardware descriptions. Its growth has been driven by the continuing complexity of IC design, including the use of third-party intellectual property (IP) blocks and embedded cores, which has made RTL and gate-level methods less efficient. The proliferation of FPGA-based ESL tools and methodologies will make it easier for designers to leverage programmable devices for critical system applications such as algorithm acceleration, high performance computing, high-speed packet processing, and rapid prototyping.

“The value of the current generation of ESL tools is particularly appealing for our system level designers, so they can evaluate their algorithmic expressions in hardware without needing to become hardware design experts,” said Sven Englund, principal engineer at DRS Power & Control Technologies, Inc. “The ease-of-use concepts that are being pioneered by Xilinx and participants in the ESL Initiative can simplify hardware design to the extent that the details of hardware implementation in an FPGA could soon become transparent to system architects.” 

Collaborating on Shared Vision
ESL tool development to date has primarily focused on the design of hard-wired devices (ASICs, ASSPs). However, the increasing sophistication of programmable system platforms such as the Xilinx Virtex™-4 and Spartan™-3 FPGAs has accelerated the need for FPGA-based ESL design methodologies. Spurred by the rapid growth and popularity of Platform FPGAs, many ESL tool providers are incorporating support for Xilinx FPGAs as a key focus of their product strategy. Collaboration with the ESL ecosystem is the principle tenet of the Xilinx strategy and initiative for bringing ESL closer to the mainstream FPGA community. Empowering the move to higher level design also played a strategic factor in the recent acquisition of AccelChip, Inc. through which Xilinx provides its own robust ESL tool support.

Many applications targeted for high-end FPGAs are initially captured algorithmically in HLLs such as C or MATLAB. This has led to growing interest by the FPGA user community in tools that can provide an implementation path directly from HLLs to hardware. ESL methodologies hold the promise of streamlining the design approach by accepting designs written in C or MATLAB languages and implementing the function straight into hardware. Designers can also leverage ESL to optimize performance by expo rting compute intensive “bottleneck” functions into an FPGA coprocessor implemented in programmable hardware.

“Mercury provides a broad range of FPGA-based products, software tools, and programming services. ESL tools will enable software engineers across the board to manage their own programming requirements,” said Craig Lund, vice president and chief technology officer at Mercury. “We’re excited to see Xilinx’s efforts to expand the ESL ecosystem for FPGAs, which will allow customers to select the best ESL tool for their situation.”

About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.

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Note to editors: High resolution graphic available.

# 0635

Editorial contact:

Laurie Stanley

Wired Island for Xilinx, Inc.

(408) 879-5292

laurie.stanley@xilinx.com